The Wandering Soul Murders

by Gail Bowen

  We walked downstairs and knocked at the door at the end of the front hall. A man in his mid-twenties wearing sweatpants and a very white T-shirt answered. He had the powerful shoulders and upper arms of someone who worked out. Keith introduced us, and the man, whose name was Sean Gilliland, shook hands with me, then turned to Keith.

  “Your father got out of bed and fell,” he said. “I’d bathed him and brought his bedtime snack and we watched the news together. Then I turned out the lights and came into the living room. I was doing my stretch and strengthens when I heard this crash. I went in and he was on the floor. Mr. Harris, he’d been trying to make a phone call.”

  Keith looked at him incredulously. “A phone call?”

  Sean shook his head. “I know. But that’s what he was doing. He was over by that little table with the telephone. He must have dragged himself over on the furniture. He still had the receiver in his hand when I found him.”

  As we passed through the living room, I glanced at the TV. The sound was turned off; on the screen, six men as muscular as Sean were silently working on their abdominal muscles.

  Blaine’s room was cool and dimly lit. I stayed in the doorway and Keith went to his father. The old man looked pale and shaken; even across the room I could see the ugliness of the purplish knot rising on his forehead. Keith talked to his father for a while, soothing words I couldn’t hear, and Blaine seemed calm. Then he saw me.

  As soon as he caught sight of me, the old man tried to push himself up to a sitting position. All the while he was pushing himself, he was trying to talk. The sounds that came out were garbled and desperate. Finally, he got out a single word, “Killdeer.” As soon as he said the word, he fell back on the bed exhausted. But his eyes never left my face.

  “Killdeer?” I said. “Do you mean my name, Kilbourn?”

  He began to push himself up again. Sean came over to me quickly. “Would you mind staying in the other room? Mr. Harris isn’t supposed to get upset.”

  I went into the living room. Keith came out almost immediately. He put his arms around me. “I’m going to call the doctor. Do you want to go upstairs and wait for me?”

  I shook my head. “I think I’ll take a cab home. The day seems to have caught up with me.”

  He kissed my hair. “Damn,” he said. “This evening shouldn’t end with your going home alone.” He smiled. “Jo, if I can find a copy of ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ will you give me another chance?”

  “I’ll bring the tuna casserole,” I said. “Call me later and let me know how your father is.”

  Keith called the doctor and then he dialled a cab for me. While I waited for it, I watched the strong young men on the television stretch and strengthen their already perfect bodies.

  When I got home, Mieka was sitting at the kitchen table in her nightgown working on her business accounts.

  “Can I retire yet?” I said.

  She made a face. “Not unless you have a source of income I don’t know about.”

  “Is it going to be okay?” I asked.

  Mieka smiled. “It’s going to be fine. Lorraine’s going to set up a line of credit for me on Monday.”

  “She’s really good to you, isn’t she?” I said.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without her, Mum.” Mieka took off her glasses. “Are you warming to her at all? I know she’s not the kind of woman you cozy up to, but you know, Mum, she hasn’t had an easy life. She kind of manipulated the wedding with Greg’s dad, and I think she got more than she bargained for. Alisdair had pretty well gambled away all their money by the time he died, and Lorraine had a little boy to support. She’s had to work hard to get where she is.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “I knew Greg was just a baby when his father died, but I always thought it was the Harris money that kept things going there.”

  Mieka shook her head. “All Alisdair Harris left Lorraine and Greg was that place on the lake, mortgaged to the hilt, and a lot of angry creditors. Old Mr. Harris just about went broke himself trying to pay off his son’s debts. Keith tried to help, but Lorraine insisted she could do it on her own. And you know, Mum, when she was getting started in real estate, women had to be …” She hesitated.

  “Men pleasers?” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess. Lorraine still talks about having to use her womanly wiles. But to be fair to her, the kind of men you knew at the university and even in politics were more enlightened than some of the men Lorraine had to deal with. She’s done very well for herself, you know.”

  “I know she has,” I said. “And I intend to smarten up.”

  Mieka laughed. “See that you do. How was dinner?”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “Anything I need to know about around here?”

  “No. The kids had three Big Macs each and fries and milkshakes, then Angus made himself a grilled cheese sandwich before he went to bed. There were a couple of phone calls for Peter. Jill called for you. She’ll call tomorrow. I think that’s it. Except for a prank call. Someone called and made weird noises and then dropped the receiver. Probably some meatball friend of Angus’s.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  But I knew who had called, and I knew it wasn’t a prank. I climbed the stairs and went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like a woman who had just about been made love to. I smiled at my reflection. Then I remembered, and I stopped smiling. What had Blaine Harris seen in my face? What was there about me that had made him drag himself along the furniture in his bedroom and risk his health to call me on the telephone?

  “Killdeer,” I said to my reflection. “Killdeer,” and I turned away and went to bed.

  CHAPTER

  6

  As I dressed for Christy’s funeral the bedroom was dark. Since the early hours of morning, thunder had cracked and lightning had arced across the sky. Now the rain had come, steady and relentless. I smoothed the skirt of my black silk suit and checked my reflection in the mirror. The silver bracelet encircling my wrist gleamed dully – Christy’s bracelet, now mine.

  Three days earlier, Mieka had sent the keys to Christy’s condominium to a friend in Saskatoon and asked her to go to Christy’s place and choose a dress for her to be buried in. The woman had found a simple cotton dress the colour of a new fern; the price and the care instructions were still pinned to the sleeve. When Mieka brought it to the house to show me, I’d shuddered.

  “Your great-grandmother always said that a green dress was bad luck.”

  Mieka had looked at me grimly. “I don’t think Christy’s luck could get much worse,” she had said.

  Christy wore the green dress. I dreaded seeing her at the funeral home, but it seemed to come with the territory when you were next of kin. Mieka and I drove over together the morning before the funeral. We were silent as we looked at Christy. Finally, Mieka reached over and touched the bracelet on my wrist.

  “We should put this on her, I guess,” Mieka said. “I never saw her without it until that last night.”

  “She wanted me to have it,” I said.

  “She did? But I thought …”

  I turned it on my wrist so I could read the Celtic lettering. “Wandering Soul Pray For Me.” In that moment, I felt the bracelet’s power. Marcel Proust called these objects that are charged with independent life “Madeleine objects.” Sensible people don’t believe in such things, and I am a sensible woman, but from the moment I put it on, Christy Sinclair’s bracelet was both a reminder and a spur.

  I turned to my daughter.

  “Mieka, would you mind leaving me alone with Christy for a moment?”

  Mieka looked apprehensive.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I just want to say goodbye.”

  She left, and very quickly I stepped to the casket and reached my hand under the small of Christy’s back and half turned her. I pulled up her skirt. I could see the outline of the tattoo through the thin material of her panties, but still I had to know for certain.
I pulled at the elastic waistband and slid Christy’s underpants down. On her left buttock was the teddy bear tattoo. It was exactly the same as the tattoo I had seen on Bernice Morin the morning after she was murdered. I pulled the skirt down and turned Christy onto her back again.

  “What does it mean, Christy?” I said. “What does it mean?”

  We took two cars to the funeral. Peter was going with Mieka and Greg, and I was going with Jill Osiowy and Keith Harris. When he phoned and asked what time he should pick me up, I had told him that he didn’t have to be part of that sad day. His voice on the other end of the line had been matter of fact. “I’m interested in the long haul, Jo,” he had said simply, and I’d thought that having Keith Harris with me for the long haul might not be a bad idea.

  Planning the funeral had brought us face to face with all the unanswered questions of Christy’s life. Who were the people who cared about her? Beyond a few colleagues at the biology lab, there didn’t seem to be anyone. We had put a photo at the head of Christy’s obituary notice in the Saskatoon and Regina papers, hoping that someone who had known her before would see it and come. But it seemed a slim hope, and we had chosen the smallest of the chapels at the funeral home to avoid the depressing symbolism of empty pews. What were her favourite flowers? Her favourite pieces of music? No one knew. Pete remembered a couple of songs she’d commented on when they’d been listening to the car radio, but they were songs for the living.

  What, if anything, did Christy Sinclair believe in? She had never said. Greg went down to the library and came back with two pages of quotes about the endurance of the human spirit.

  “Is there anything there we can use for a eulogy?” he asked after I finished reading them.

  I shook my head.

  “That’s what I thought, too,” he said. “My high-school coach said stuff like that when he sent us back into a game where we were really getting nailed.”

  “Thanks for trying,” I said. “I’ve got an idea about something that won’t sound quite so much like Vince Lombardi.”

  I pulled down my volume of Theodore Roethke and looked for the poem with the image of the pickerel smile that I had always connected with Christy. The poem was called “Elegy for Jane”; Roethke had written it for a student who had died from injuries when she was thrown from a horse. I copied the poem out, and it was in my purse the day I walked through the door of Helmsing’s Funeral Home.

  We had done our best. Still, as we filed into that tiny chapel with the empty pews and the tape of “Amazing Grace” whirring lugubriously in the background, there was no denying that Christy Sinclair’s leave-taking of this world was going to be a pretty lonely affair. But as the tape changed to “Blessed Assurance,” there was a stir.

  Four young women had come in. Two were native, two weren’t, but they all shopped at the same store: stiletto heels, stirrup pants tight as a second skin on their slender legs, nylon jackets with their names embroidered on the sleeve and crosses around their necks. They were, without exception, pretty, but their hair, gelled and curled, frizzed and sprayed, was too extravagant for their young faces, and their eyes were too wary for girls who weren’t far along in puberty. They sat behind me. All during the readings I was aware of them; I could feel their presence, and I could smell the sweet heaviness of their hairspray, overpowering in the humid chapel air.

  When it was time for me to read, I felt the familiar clutch of panic, but Keith smiled encouragingly and Christy’s bracelet was warm around my wrist. I walked to the front of the room and took a deep breath. I had read “Elegy for Jane” many times in the past twenty-four hours. I knew it by heart. As I said the lines, I looked at Christy Sinclair’s small band of mourners: at Jill Osiowy, head bowed, red hair falling forward to curtain her face; at Keith, whose eyes never left mine; at Greg, whose arm rested on my daughter’s shoulder as if by his touch he could protect her; at my adult children, backs ramrod straight but sitting so close together you couldn’t have passed a paper between them, reassuring one another as they always had that, no matter what, they had each other.

  Behind them, the four young women listened to Roethke’s words with closed faces. The final stanza of “Elegy for Jane” had always seemed to me to be heartbreakingly beautiful.

  If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

  My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.

  Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

  I, with no rights in this matter.

  As I recited the words, one of the girls began to cry.

  She wasn’t the only one. When I came to the last line of the poem, I was crying, too – for Roethke’s Jane and for Christy Sinclair who had no one but me to speak the words over her grave.

  The rain hadn’t let up when we left the funeral chapel. There was a kind of portico outside the entranceway, and the young women were there in their thin jackets, looking up at the sky.

  I went over to them. “Can we give you a lift anywhere?” I asked.

  They stepped back from me as if I were an infection, but one of them, the tiny blonde who had wept during the poem, stood her ground.

  “We’re okay,” she said.

  I looked at her. Her peroxided curls were dark at the roots like Madonna’s, and her skin beneath its heavy makeup had the telltale bumps of pubescence. There were streaks of mascara down her cheeks from her tears. I took a Kleenex from my bag and held it out to her.

  “Your mascara has run a little,” I said.

  She grabbed the tissue and began scrubbing at the area under her eyes.

  “Every time I wear this goddamn stuff, somebody makes me cry,” she said.

  “Same here,” I agreed.

  For a beat, the mask dropped, and she looked at me with real interest.

  “Were you a friend of Christy’s?” I asked.

  The girl’s face closed in on itself again, and she turned on her heel and stepped into the rain.

  “Please, could we talk just for a moment?” I called after her.

  She didn’t look back. The others followed her, and I was left on the steps of the funeral home watching the four of them clip along Cornwall Street in their perilously high heels. The rain kept on coming, plastering their stirrup pants to their legs, soaking their thin jackets, bouncing impotently off the gelled curls and the hard-sprayed frizz of their elaborate hairdos. Finally, they turned a corner and vanished into the mist of the rainy city.

  There are 180,000 people in Regina. Chance encounters are not unheard of here; still, running into Kim Barilko less than twenty-four hours after talking to her outside the funeral home seemed like a cosmic stretch.

  I had dropped Taylor off at nursery school and come downtown to do a couple of errands. Later I was going to pick Taylor up, help Pete get organized for the trip to Swift Current, then meet Mieka and Lorraine Harris at the bridal salon for Mieka’s first fitting on her wedding dress. A high-stress day.

  I’d taken care of my business, and I was walking along Scarth Street toward the place I’d parked the car. The wet weather had continued. It was a grey muggy day, coast weather. There was a bridal shop on Scarth; in the gloom, its window, bright with paper apple blossoms and summer wedding gowns, was an appealing sight. I stopped to look. There was something surreal about all those mannequin brides in their virginal white. I could see my reflection in the window: a flesh-and-blood imperfect middle-aged woman in the midst of all that synthetic flawless youth. And then there was another reflection, just behind me: a young woman with the hips-forward slouch of a street kid and Madonna hair. I turned. For a split second she didn’t notice me, and I was able to see her face as she looked at that fairy-tale dress. Her mouth curved with derision, but her eyes were filled with terrifying hope. I didn’t want to see any more.

  “Remember me?” I said. “We talked yesterday after Christy Sinclair’s funeral.”

  She was wearing yesterday’s stirrup pants and a sleeveless blouse the colour of an orange Popsicle; her lipstick was that same i
mprobable orange, but frosted. A cross hung between her small breasts.

  “I remember you,” she said and she smiled. “You’ve got the same problem with Maybelline that I have.”

  There was a Dairy Queen next to the bridal shop. “Could we have a cup of coffee together – my treat?” I asked. “I’d like to talk about Christy Sinclair a little if it’s okay with you.”

  She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Sure, I’m not going anywhere. But her name was Theresa, not Christy.”

  “Theresa?” I said.

  “Like in Terry,” she said, “or the saint. If you hadn’t put the picture in the paper we wouldn’t have known it was her because of the wrong name.” She opened her bag and pulled out the obituary. She tapped at it with an orange fingernail.

  “That’s Theresa,” she said.

  “What was her last name?” I asked.

  The mask fell over her face again. “Look, I don’t think I’ve got time for a coffee, after all.”

  “Can I drive you somewhere or just walk along with you?”

  “It’s a free country,” she said, and then more kindly she added, “I have to get to the Lily Pad and help with lunch. It’s my day.”

  “Is the Lily Pad a restaurant?”

  She laughed, a short, unpleasant sound. “Yeah, it’s a restaurant, a restaurant for people with no money.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Why?” she said. “You don’t have to eat there.”

  We both laughed, and when she began walking toward Albert Street, I fell into step with her. “My name’s Joanne Kilbourn,” I said.

  “I’m Kim Barilko,” she said.

  She made good time, despite her stiletto heels.

  “So,” I said, “how did you know Theresa?”

  “From home and then at the Lily Pad,” she said. “She was going to be my mentor, but with my luck, of course, she goes and dies. I should have known better.” Kim’s lip curled with contempt at her gullibility.

  “You’re going too fast for me,” I said. “Could you fill me in a little?”